'Oldest Graduate' Is Gentle But Strong

December 14, 1985|By Elizabeth Maupin, Sentinel Theater Critic

Col. Jefferson C. Kinkaid has nothing more to live for. Most of his Army friends died in the fields of France during World War I; the last friend lingered 30 years in a veterans' hospital, a victim of mustard gas. The best of his fishing buddies died a couple of years back without the colonel's being told, and his first love slipped away almost 60 years ago, moving with her family on to better lands and a better life.

But the colonel lingers on, the oldest living graduate of Mirabeau B. Lamar Military Academy, an annoyance and a stumbling block to his son Floyd, who would sell the land the colonel loves. The Oldest Living Graduate is a melancholy story and a familiar one, and the Tropical Theatre has given it, the third of its Texas Trilogy series, a compelling, darkly comical telling.

Written by Preston Jones, a Texas director and playwright who died in 1979 at the age of 43, the three plays of A Texas Trilogy were produced in Dallas and Washington, D.C., to great acclaim before they had a short, unsuccessful run on Broadway in 1976. All three are set in a South Texas town called Bradleyville and involve some of the same characters, and all three have both comic and serious elements. But each has a different feel -- The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia is broad social satire, Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander is warmer comic drama and The Oldest Living Graduate is gentler -- and more forceful -- still.

The Oldest Living Graduate, which takes place at the same time in 1962 as Knights of the White Magnolia, is set at the Kinkaid ranch, where the colonel lives with his son Floyd and daughter-in-law Maureen. Floyd wants the colonel to give him a piece of land to develop into a fancy vacation community; cynical, languorous Maureen is skeptical of the idea (as of almost everything else); and the colonel refuses to listen at all, preferring to reminisce to a young handyman or to sink back into his memories alone.

This Tropical production really has just one problem -- the casting of a young man to play the part of Col. Kinkaid. In Knights of the White Magnolia, Ron Ross eventually overcomes that impediment; in Oldest Living Graduate, he does so much sooner, making the audience nearly forget the absence of wrinkles on his neck or of quavers in his voice. Ross puts on the odd, staccato intonation of an old man, and he makes the colonel a gleeful sort, seemingly laughing most of the time at his foolish juniors, answering the telephone with a karate chop of the hand. As the colonel begins to realize that his memories are all dead, Ross grows more still in his wheelchair, and his realization is affecting. ''I just let everything slip by . . . let it all slip by,'' he says, and his voice fades into nothingness.

In fact, the cast of Oldest Living Graduate, directed by Francis Michaels and Miriam P. Saunders, is consistently fine. Jesse Charles is terrific as Floyd Kinkaid, his hair slicked back, his Western shirt shot through with silver threads. Charles is all earnest businessman, impressed with his own small ideas, until his father gets through to him in the end and he becomes a man bowed. Equally good is Peg O'Keef as wife Maureen, who lounges in toreador pants and is so used to drinking her days away that she neatly catches a dribble of whiskey on her chin with the rim of a glass.

The smaller parts are well done, too -- Roger N. Scott and Beth Cunningham as Floyd's hard, tacky business partner and his stupid wife; Russ Oleson as a military cadet; Anne Walker as a nurse; and especially William Keith Waxler, whose handyman, the colonel's confidante, is warm and natural, and whose military school commandant is just as clipped and false.

The Oldest Living Graduate is as imbued with satire as Floyd's shirt is with silver -- Floyd wants to entertain a group of influential politicians in the Tumbleweed Room of the local Holiday Inn, and his friends the Sickingers, Clarence and Martha Ann, are as nouveau riche as they can be. This production adds a little satire of its own, too, with such set-pieces as the Kinkaids' horse-head cigarette lighter and with Martha Ann Sickinger's awful, wonderful '60s sheathes. But what remains in the mind is the poignance of an old man who is held in scorn by those who should revere him, an old man whose happiness is long in the past. The Oldest Living Graduate honors that man.